I would be more than grateful if someone could tell me why, when I try to play a game on my laptop, only the top left quarter of the screen is used - the remaining three quarters of the screen is black, and therefore all of this section of the imagery is lost in the blackness too! I did 'try' to update my vid driver last week and since then, this has happened..... would it be a fault there? I had the evaluation version of Winzip - which has expired - so perhaps the answer lies there. My hair is well and truly being pulled out! Help.

This will happen when a game has a hard time with the video card, or the CD is not being read properly. When a game starts, it runs a little program called a "screen blanker", this lays a black field over your desktop so that the game can essentially take over the screen to display its own graphics. When the screen blanker does not run properly, you get this problem. Goto the game manufacturer's website and see if there is a compatability issue with your optical device or your video card and/or video drivers. I've had to swap out a perfectly good CDROM to compensate for a single program having this problem. Sometimes, a driver update will fix this, sometimes another component that is compatable must be swapped. CHeck and repost.

Thank you thank you Dogbreath, for your time. I will look into what you say. The games were playing perfectly up until it went wrong - but I will most certainly investigate your thoughts further and write a proper reply.